PARTISAN REVIEW
of the inore conspicuous phenomena of our epoch. Macdonald is a
writer of engaging
pe~Mnality
and a marked deficiency of political
intelligence. The attitudes he strikes suggest that he is far more open
to the romantic lure of extreme ideologies-once it was blood-and–
thunder revolution and now it is goodness absolute and invulnerable
-than to the appeal of rational analysis. His latest reasoning may be
summed up politically in the following syllogism: "Everything has
failed us, liberalism, Social Democracy, Bolshevism, and the working
class too-therefore let us go forward to the earthly paradise." At
bottom
this
approach is really the same as that of Dos Passos, only
turned inside out; it is likewise the product of disillusionment pure
and simple. One is precipitant in his rush toward a position of indis–
criminate leftism, while the other is equally precipitant in his indis–
criminate rightism. Both flee, though in opposite directions, from the
difficult and wholly unglamorous possibilities of socialist politics in
this
desperate age.
"All the beautiful ideologies have burst," a British poet has
lately written. That is true, and
it
has left a good many of us with
the kind of wasteland feeling which in the thirties, in the palmy days
of Marxist hope and enthusiasm, we used to ascribe to the "bourgeois
intellectuals" as their exclusive malaise. Yet painful as the bursting
was and damaging to morale, it is time to rally from the blow and
to
admit that the ideologies, including our own, were too good to be
true, too beautiful to be real.
Socialism,
however, is not identical
with its historical ideologies, such as Marxism or anarchism. It re–
mains a viable idea, even
if
stripped of its ideological trappings.
Mter all, what other ideas are there?
The debacle has taught us what not to expect and what not to
believe in. For one thing, it has taught us that something more than
the profit motive stands between us and the good society. The power
motive is no less potent in human affairs, and of that Lenin and
Trotsky told us far too little, though it has already undone all that
they appeared to have accomplished through their great revolution.
The lesson of experience, too, is that the idea of a revolutionary elite
-a selfless brotherhood of world salvationists-leading a proletarian
mass sufficiently capable of self-definition to master its social fate
is an open invitation to dictatorship. It is plain that the masses
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